Google is taking another swing at the smart glasses market, determined to leave the missteps of Google Glass in the past. On Dec. 12, the company unveiled Android XR, a new, cutting-edge operating system for headsets and smart glasses. With the competition heating up from the Meta Quest series and Apple Vision Pro leading the market, Google is banking on its Gemini generative AI to set its offering apart. Among the first devices slated to leverage Android XR is a pair of Samsung glasses, codenamed Project Moohan, expected to hit store shelves in 2025. The tech giant says the future headsets and smart glasses will “transform how you watch, work, and explore.” While Google has yet to announce a timeline for additional hardware or software built on Android XR, the operating system is already available in preview for developers and select partners. What makes Android XR different? Android XR glasses can provide hands-free navigation. Image: Google Combining Android XR, Google Gemini, and the glasses hardware means the devices can: Answer natural-language questions about your surroundings using Gemini. Search the internet or create an AI-guided to-do list with natural language. Play YouTube and Google TV. Display Google Photos in a virtual reality gallery. Use Circle to Search to get more information about an object in the real world or an item online. Google intends for Android XR to power various types of smart glasses. “We want there to be lots of choices of stylish, comfortable glasses you’ll love to wear every day and that work seamlessly with your other Android devices,” Shahram Izadi, Google’s VP and general manager of Extended Reality, wrote in a blog post. The tech giant plans to start privately testing Android XR on new hardware soon. Expect new devices from Google’s Qualcomm partners, particularly Sony, Lynx, and XREAL. SEE: Google’s newest AI model, Gemini 2.0 Flash, is an incremental move toward ‘agentic’ AI. More Google news & tips Developers can try the Android XR software development kit now Developers can experiment with the Android XR software development kit today by visiting developer.android.com/develop/xr. Google is accepting applications for an Android XR Developer Bootcamp, which will provide early access to hardware in exchange for collaboration with the internal XR team. Android XR is compatible with ARCore, Android Studio, Jetpack Compose, Unity, and OpenXR. Since Android XR includes the Android Play Store, developers with apps already in the Play Store can automatically make those apps available on extended reality devices. To translate conventional apps to extended reality, Android recommends using its automatic tools for spatializing Material Design (M3) components and Compose for adaptive layouts. source

By Maria Colsey Heard, Stephen Cobb and Hannah Cornett Land ( December 11, 2024, 5:57 PM EST) — Your company’s marketing and product development teams work hard to craft compelling and informative labels, packaging and advertisements for your latest product or service. But are they fully aware of how broadly false advertising is viewed by state attorneys general?… Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Just about every business I’ve started has involved hiring freelancers. They’re more affordable and flexible, plus it’s easier to scale up or down as needed. One or two is easy, but things can get messy when you’re dealing with any more than that. I’ve since built my own custom freelancer management system, I started with freelancer management templates. Here’s a curated list of my favorites. monday.com: A powerful and flexible freelancer management template Trusted by over 225,000+ businesses, monday.com is one of the most popular project management platforms out there. It’s perfect if you need an organized and flexible way to manage work for your in-house team, freelancers, agencies, and even other departments. monday.com has a free plan for up to two users. It’s limited, but it is a good place to start if you want to try it out before paying. More on monday.com: monday.com Review | monday.com vs Jira | monday.com vs. Notion. monday.com makes it easy to manage work for your entire pool of resources in one place. Image: monday.com To start, you’ll need to add all of your resources, including freelancers and in-house team members if you’re managing their work here too. From there, you can invite as many guest users as you need to at no extra cost. Once they’re onboarded, you can start assigning tasks. They will be able to track their time, monitor deadlines, upload files, leave comments, and more. The best part about this template is how it brings all of your outsourced tasks together. You’ll easily be able to keep track of everything happening outside the company in one place. Each task can have its own status, allocated amount of time, due date, owner, and assignee. It’s simple, yet effective. You can also add additional columns if you need to. monday.com makes it easy to control access and editing capabilities so you don’t have to worry about freelancers being able to see things you don’t want them to. ClickUp: A Kanban-style freelancer management template ClickUp is another powerful option if you want a complete project management solution. Its generous free plan includes collaborative document sharing, whiteboard features, sprint management, calendar views, and Kanban boards. It’s more than enough to get started and many smaller businesses can stay on the free plan for quite some time. You’ll be able to invite as many free users as you’d like, just keep in mind that you won’t have granular access controls unless you upgrade. More on ClickUp: ClickUp Review | ClickUp vs Asana | ClickUp vs. Notion. ClickUp’s freelancer management template is simple and straightforward yet powerful enough to manage dozens of contractors. Image: Clickup.com Kanban boards are simple, familiar, and highly visual — they’re great for managing projects and tasks, especially those you’re outsourcing to a contractor. They likely won’t have to learn a new system or wonder how it works. All you have to do is create a backlog of tasks, assign them, set due dates, and invite them to collaborate with you on ClickUp. They’ll be able to manage their work, mark tasks as complete, leave comments, ask questions, collaborate on documents, chat with you, and more. It takes just a few minutes to configure everything if you’re using this template as is. Otherwise, it may take up to an hour to customize it to match your needs. You can adjust the columns, fields that show on each card, what it looks like when you open a card, and just about every other element. You can even turn off features you aren’t going to use. This ensures nobody uses them by accident. Knack: Manage projects, resumes, and invoices in one place Knack is a no-code development platform that’s great for companies who want to create their own custom apps. You can use it to build web portals, databases, project trackers, and even a directory to manage all of your freelancers. There’s no free plan, but there is a 14-day free trial if you want to try it before you invest. Plans start at $59 per month. It’s a bit pricey, but it’s worth it if you need the level of customization it provides. Create a full freelance management system with Knack. Image: Knack.com This template is great if you need a full system to manage freelancer projects and tasks, invoices, service agreements, and resumes. It allows you to create a complete directory of every freelancer you’ve ever worked with. This can be useful if you want to have an approved list of contractors or a large pool of freelancers you can pick from at any time. It’s also invaluable if you do a lot of recruiting or cycling through. You’ll be able to categorize your directory based on their skills, experience level, type of agreement, or any other custom attribute you’d like. This makes it easy to find exactly what you need when you need it. Contractors will be able to send invoices and even add a portfolio of their work directly within the platform. They have full access to their profiles and can update them any time. The downside of this template is how much upfront work is required. You’ll likely have to do a bit of customizing, training, and tweaking before you start using it. Building a custom no-code app is always more challenging than you think it’ll be. But it definitely pays off if you need it. Airtable: A comprehensive freelancer management database As a powerful relational database builder, Airtable makes it easy for non-developers to build systems, including a freelancer management database. On top of that, you can utilize automations to streamline notifications, task assignments, and more. Airtable’s free plan supports up to 1,000 records per base, which is more than enough to start. More on Airtable: Airtable Review | Airtable vs Asana | Airtable vs Trello. Manage freelancers and their work with Airtable’s powerful relational database platform. Image: Airtable.com This template comes with prebuilt tables for contractors, assignments, projects, and your internal team. Although it’s

（相）皇臻品禮坊創辦人皇姐表示，自1997年起，致力製造並銷售，揉合了古法智慧和現代技藝的陳年柚子參。 香港秋冬天氣乾燥容易喉乾咳嗽，皇臻品禮坊嚴選台南的珍稀老樹大白柚和多種天然食材，全人手製作潤喉清肺的陳年柚子參。今年，品牌再度參加本地年度盛事工展會。為隆重其事，更設計昔日港、台街邊攤販的花車，配以香港特色的霓虹燈牌作招徠，並帶來多款產品和獨家優惠，勢必推廣進軍本地市場。 皇臻品禮坊創辦人皇姐攜品牌於2017年進駐香港，希望最優質的好產品在有需求的市場發揚光大。今年第二年參加工展會，看好本地的養生保健市場，希望藉今次的年度盛事，擴大市場份額，讓更多香港人認識品牌。 她續指，今年是廠商會90周年，工展會也有很多宣傳推廣和優惠，加上這是年度採買優質、優惠好貨的機會，市民反應比較去年更熱烈。故她預計，現場入場會出現盛況，其攤位的人流按年升10%至30%，銷售額按年多3倍。 皇臻品禮坊今年的工展會攤位位於5C-65-66，並帶來工展會的限時獨家優惠，3萬包30克裝的「馬膳庭.陳年柚子參」免費派發給打卡的入場人士。顧客只要讚好皇臻品禮坊的小紅書或Facebook專頁（詳見檔案QR code），即可獲贈。 至於其他限時優惠，包括30克裝的「馬膳庭.陳年柚子參」買一送一、購買兩樽200克裝的「馬膳庭.陳年柚子參」，即送一樽價值HK$150的50克裝！購買8樽200克裝「馬膳庭.陳年柚子參」，送1樽200克裝、1樽50克裝和1個價值$180保溫瓶。同場，還有名滿金門的必買產品「金門一條根」，以及矯娘娘海燕窩系列等，由內到外照顧每位客人的需要。 關於皇臻品禮坊 1997年於台灣創立，生產手工製陳年柚子參，至2017年進駐香港。皇臻品禮坊一直專注於以古法配方、生產手工製的優質陳年柚子蔘，致力做到「含一顆止咳清肺，泡三顆潤喉亮嗓」。品牌譽滿港、台、新加坡等地，近年，於香港榮獲「優質正印」和「2024年香港最佳養生品牌」殊榮。香港和新加坡的顧客忠誠度高達90%，十位顧客中有九位成為老主顧，見證品牌的品質與效果。 地址：尖沙咀中港城一樓 ；WhatsApp電話查詢：+852 5111 5657 LinkedIn Email Facebook Twitter WhatsApp The post 工展會推介：台廠皇臻品禮坊推潤喉清肺產品 打卡送手工製陳年柚子參 appeared first on VeriMedia. source

Manish Limaye Pillar #1: Data platform  The data platform pillar comprises tools, frameworks and processing and hosting technologies that enable an organization to process large volumes of data, both in batch and streaming modes. Organizations must decide on their hosting provider, whether it be an on-prem setup, cloud solutions like AWS, GCP, Azure or specialized data platform providers such as Snowflake and Databricks. They must also select the data processing frameworks — such as Spark, Beam or SQL-based processing — and choose tools for ML.  Based on business needs and the nature of the data, raw vs structured, organizations should determine whether to set up a data warehouse, a Lakehouse or consider a data fabric technology. The choice of vendors should align with the broader cloud or on-premises strategy. For example, if a company has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider and is committed to primarily operating within AWS, it makes sense to utilize the AWS data platform. Similarly, there is a case for Snowflake, Cloudera or other platforms, depending on the company’s overarching technology strategy.  However, I am not in favor of assembling numerous tools in pursuit of the elusive “best of breed” dream, as integrating these tools is excessively time-consuming, and technology evolves too rapidly for DIY integration to keep up. Furthermore, generally speaking, data should not be split across multiple databases on different cloud providers to achieve cloud neutrality. Not my original quote, but a cardinal sin of cloud-native data architecture is copying data from one location to another. That’s free money given to cloud providers and creates significant issues in end-to-end value generation.  source

By David Balto ( December 9, 2024, 5:20 PM EST) — President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory might signal the beginning of the end of the federal government’s antitrust crusade against algorithmic artificial intelligence technology…. Law360 is on it, so you are, too. A Law360 subscription puts you at the center of fast-moving legal issues, trends and developments so you can act with speed and confidence. Over 200 articles are published daily across more than 60 topics, industries, practice areas and jurisdictions. A Law360 subscription includes features such as Daily newsletters Expert analysis Mobile app Advanced search Judge information Real-time alerts 450K+ searchable archived articles And more! Experience Law360 today with a free 7-day trial. source

Source: GIPHY For companies, it’s a foregone conclusion that consumers want personalized interactions, but this is not entirely true. In Forrester’s October 2024 Consumer Pulse Survey, 33% of US consumers said that they never want to receive personalized interactions from companies. Consumers are also increasingly privacy-aware and feel that companies need to provide something in return for giving up their personal data. Even then, our consumer data dating back to 2020 shows that at least 30% of consumers consistently indicate that nothing will motivate them to share more personal data with companies. Consumers simply want relevancy and value. Relevancy doesn’t mean that it needs to be a 1:1 interaction with a consumer or customer. A personalized interaction could deliver relevancy via broad segmentation to a large group of consumers or at an individual customer level. What matters is that it’s a contextually appropriate interaction. Consumers need to realize value from that personalized interaction across Forrester’s four dimensions of customer value: Economic value. Consumers realize economic value when they save money, get free things, or feel that they’re paying a fair or predictable price. In today’s environment, 62% of US consumers want economic value from personalized interactions, according to Forrester’s October 2024 Consumer Pulse Survey. Functional value. When consumers find usefulness during product or service decisions, the buying process, or support and help, they feel functional value. From the same survey, 36% of US consumers want personalized interactions to provide functional value. Experiential value. Interactions and sensations such as design and sensory allure or courtesy and reassurance support experiential value. Twenty-eight percent of consumers care about personalized interactions having positive experiential value. Symbolic value. When consumers feel meaning such as self-affirmation, social standing, support and caring, or belonging and connection, they realize symbolic value from companies. Fifteen percent of US consumers want personalized interactions to provide symbolic value.   To guide your consumer personalization research journey, check out our new The State Of Consumer Personalization, 2024 report, then follow up with the strategy, data, technology, and measurement modules. There’s a lot to unpack on the topic of consumer personalization, so let’s continue the conversation. Schedule a guidance session or inquiry with us. source

If PowerShell’s learning curve has kept you from embracing it, “cool” might not be a word you’d associate with it. But PowerShell is here to stay. It’s a core part of Microsoft 365, Azure, and Windows Server 2022 and has immense power. In this article, TechRepublic will offer a few tricks that could come in handy. Besides, it is always cooler when you amaze someone with the solution from the command line. Having someone watch you right-click and fix something doesn’t have the same appeal. Note: Be careful, very careful Yes, this is a tool worthy of the name. PowerShell can easily cause massive configuration changes, positive or negative — so protect yourself and establish a test environment for your learning experiences. Also, consider using the -confirm parameter to test configurations before execution for certain commands. 1. Report all of the USB devices installed PowerShell is Windows Management Instrumentation aware. From PowerShell, you can make a WMI call to retrieve the USB devices installed in a local or remote system: gwmi Win32_USBControllerDevice -computername SERVER1 |fl Antecedent,Dependent This filter will bring back the antecedent and dependent fields from the SERVER1 computer. Should you want the full export, you can omit the pipe, | , and filter statement to comprehensively export the USB devices on a system. This could be useful for maintaining a report for servers with a USB license device installed to maintain connectivity from the device’s perspective. 2. Perform your favorite Command Prompt tasks All tasks performed in the Command Prompt can also be done within PowerShell. This could help you become more familiar with the interface. Launch PowerShell in the Run dialog box with the command powershell. You can also assign a shortcut key to PowerShell so Ctrl + Shift + P launches it directly. 3. Kill a process in PowerShell instead of Task Manager When you have a Windows service running that will not respond to stop commands, you can use PowerShell to perform the equivalent actions of ending the task within Task Manager. For instance, you’d do the following for BadThread.exe: get-process BadTh* The results will be similar to this: Handles NPM(K) PM(K) WS(K) VM(M) CPU(s) Id ProcessName ——- —— —– —– —– —— — ———– 28 4 -210844 -201128 -163 25.67 2792 BadThread Once the Process ID has been identified, you can kill the errant process by entering: stop-process -id 2792 At that point, the BadThread example will be hard stopped and you can resume your attempt to start the service. You can do that right here in PowerShell as well. But, if the process doesn’t terminate gracefully, you can use the -Force parameter: stop-process -id 2792 -Force Be cautious when using it, as it could result in data loss or corruption if the process is in the middle of a task. 4. Use PSDrive to view more than just drives The PSDrive command lets you view objects of the Windows environment beyond traditional network, local, or removable drives. One popular view is the HKLM PSDrive, which allows you to view the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE top-level hive of the registry. To get into the registry, enter the following command: PS C:> cd HKLM: PS HKLM:/> You are then transported into the registry hive and can view and even delete items, should you wish. 5. Export NTFS folder permissions — recursive or not Managing NTFS permissions is a separate matter, but with PowerShell, you can export the permissions to audit access or take a quick look at access control lists for the security configuration. This can be a great accountability mechanism to run in a scripted format periodically — or you can run it on demand to diagnose a particular issue. For example, take the following iteration: PS E:>Get-Acl N:Data This will give you a quick report of your security rights to the specified path (note that it won’t give the shared access). That alone is nothing too exciting, as it will report only the single specified path. But if you want to include recursion for the entire path, you can use other strategies. For the same N:Data path, you’d use the Get-ChildItem command within PowerShell, combined with the Get-Acl command. Consider the following example: PS E:>Get-ChildItem N:Data -recurse | Get-Acl This will span the entire N:Data path and display the ACLs for the contents of the path. What happens here is that the Get-ChildItem provides an inventory of the file system objects, and that collection is passed to Get-Acl to provide the results for each item. If you want to archive this to a comma-separated variable (CSV) document, you pass | export-csv c:filename.csv at the end of the command. You can also pass the normal > C:filename.txt to the end of the command to get it exported to a text file. Note that when you use the -recurse option, it does just that and will traverse the entire path you specify. So be careful when doing it across a large volume or over the network. 6. Background a time-consuming task If you have a command, or cmdlet, that will take some time to run, you can use PowerShell to send it to the background to complete. In this way, you can send a series of commands to execute at once and let them complete on their schedule. The command to launch a background job leads with the start-psjob parameter. You can query PowerShell on the status of any of the jobs with the following command: PS C:>get-psjob You’ll see a table of results showing the status of your jobs, with a unique session identifier for each one. You can remove any failed jobs by running the following command: PS C:>remove-psjob 9 7. Insert timestamps into PowerShell outputs For your PowerShell tasks, you can have a timestamp entered in series to determine how long a single step occurs or use it as a logging mechanism for your scripts. To insert a timestamp, enter one of the following commands as a single line within your .ps1 file: Date

Moreover, the subject matter of many prompts, some of which involved suicidal ideation and violence, among other disturbing topics, coupled with restrictions from Scale AI around break times and outside research, created a grueling, authoritarian workplace in which workers could be terminated for complaining about working conditions, payments, or company processes, the complaint said. Additionally, the suit says that McKinney and the many others in his position were misclassified under California law as independent contractors, rather than employees. Generally speaking, employers have fewer legal responsibilities to independent contractors than they have to full employees, who are more likely to be subject to state and federal laws about overtime payment, among other things. California’s legal standard for deciding which workers are independent contractors and which are employees is fairly strict, and is referred to as an ABC test, for its three-pronged nature. According to the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, workers are employees unless they are free from the control and direction of the hiring entity, are doing work outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business, and are “customarily engaged” in an independent business of the type they’re being hired for. None of those standards, the lawsuit argues, are met in the case of McKinney and the other Scale AI workers in his position. source

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More OpenAI has officially launched its o1 model, transitioning out of preview to become a core feature of the ChatGPT platform. And now, it can also analyze images — a hugely helpful feature upgrade as it enables users to upload photos and have the AI chatbot respond to them, giving them detailed plans on how to build a birdhouse entirely from a single candid photo of one, for one fun example. In another, potentially more serious and impressive example, it is now capable of helping design data centers from sketches. Initially available to ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers globally, o1 represents a significant evolution in reasoning model capabilities, including better handling of complex tasks, image-based reasoning, and enhanced accuracy. Enterprise and Education users will gain access to the model next week. This release coincides with OpenAI’s rollout of a new subscription tier, ChatGPT Pro, which leaked ahead of its announcement today. Priced at $200 per month, ChatGPT Pro is targeted at professionals and organizations requiring scalable, research-grade AI tools. It offers unlimited access to OpenAI’s most advanced capabilities, including exclusive versions of the o1 reasoning model, GPT-4o, and the Advanced Voice feature. OpenAI co-founder and CEO and Sam Altman announced the news on a YouTube livestream on December 5, 2024 at 10 am PT as part of OpenAI’s ongoing “12 Days of OpenAI” series of new updates timed to coincide with the end of the year and winter holidays (i.e. “12 Days of Christmas”). o1 advances The o1 model family, first introduced in September 2024, aims to tackle real-world challenges with refined reasoning, coding, and mathematical capabilities. Compared to its preview version, the updated o1 delivers faster responses and a 34% reduction in major errors on difficult problems. It is also capable of analyzing and explaining image uploads, unlocking new applications in fields like healthcare and engineering. Early benchmarks highlight the model’s competitive edge. For example, o1-preview successfully solved 83% of problems in the International Mathematics Olympiad qualifying exam, a sharp improvement from GPT-4o’s 13% success rate. OpenAI’s updates also include safety enhancements, with the o1-preview scoring 84 on a rigorous safety test, compared to 22 for its predecessor. These advancements position o1 as a versatile tool for users in STEM fields and beyond. OpenAI has indicated plans to further expand the model’s functionality, including web browsing, file uploads, and richer API integration to support vision, function calling, and structured outputs. In addition, OpenAI researcher Noam Brown took to X to confirm that o1 was the long-rumored OpenAI model codenamed “Strawberry” internally, and that it “can do a little better than just counting how many r’s are in ‘strawberry’” — a rhetorical understatement if I’ve ever seen one. Brown posted screenshots showing how the model via ChatGPT was able to construct an entire 3 paragraph essay about strawberries without using a single letter “e” after thinking for 45 seconds. Premium pricing The introduction of ChatGPT Pro represents OpenAI’s latest move to cater to high-demand users. Priced at $200 per month, this tier provides unlimited access to enhanced tools, such as a high-compute version of o1, which dedicates additional processing power to deliver optimal solutions for challenging queries. Subscribers also gain access to GPT-4o, known for its advanced natural language generation capabilities, and the Advanced Voice feature for speech-based interactions. ChatGPT Pro’s pricing significantly exceeds other tiers, such as ChatGPT Plus at $20 per month or ChatGPT Team at $30 per month, reflecting its specialized focus on delivering peak performance for complex applications. However, encourage the use of AI in societal-benefit fields, OpenAI has announced the ChatGPT Pro Grant Program. The initiative will initially award 10 grants to leading medical researchers, providing free access to ChatGPT Pro tools. A well-timed release The launch of o1 and ChatGPT Pro comes amid intensifying competition in the AI industry. Chinese rivals, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, have released reasoning models like Marco-o1 and R1-Lite-Preview, are encroaching fast, challenging OpenAI’s dominance with open-source solutions and eclipsing o1-preview on certain third-party benchmarks. These developments reflect the growing demand for large reasoning models (LRMs) capable of handling complex problem-solving tasks. As OpenAI continues to refine its offerings, the rollout of o1 and ChatGPT Pro marks a milestone in its quest to provide accessible, high-performance AI tools. Whether these developments can maintain OpenAI’s leadership in an increasingly crowded market remains to be seen. source